4 Fox News Reactions To The Christopher Lane Shooting

Oklahoma FoxNews

On August 16th, Christopher Lane — an Australian student on a baseball scholarship at East Central University — was killed in Duncan, Oklahoma. When the teenagers who were apprehended for Lane’s shooting were asked why they killed him, they answered, “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.”

The national media has been covering the tragedy and its political implications at length: What does this say about race, youth, family, and guns in the U.S.? But no network is covering the story quite like Fox News, which seems to have lost its collective mind over the killing. Here are Fox’s four most outrageous reactions to the tragedy:

Photo: The Five via Fox News

The Shooters Could Have Been Aborted

On America Live Thursday, host Shannon Bream asked Janet Morana, the executive director of Priests for Life, how the shooters could “end up where they are.” Morana responded, “These kids are survivors, they could have been aborted. And that’s a fact that people don’t realize.”

Morana went on to say the three teenagers have survivor syndrome: “Just the fact that you could have been aborted can affect you as a survivor of Roe v. Wade.”

H/T: Media Matters


Blame Government Assistance

State Senator Elbert Guillory (R-LA) discussed the shooting on Your World With Neil Cavuto on Thursday night. His explanation of the 15- 16- and 17-year-olds’ motives: government providing too much assistance to low-income families.

“The recent tragedy, that’s a perfect example of what happens when government gives everyone their food, their housing, their clothing… they have nothing to do. They just sit around, play some violent video games and then go out and kill people.” Guillory explained, “It’s a tragedy that is predictable when you do everything for people and they have nothing to do for themselves. They don’t have to pick up a fork or a knife even.”

H/T:Media Matters


President Obama Is Stirring Racial Animosity

Republican strategist Kate Obenshain spoke out against the president on The O’Reilly Factor Wednesday night — shocking even O’Reilly himself.

O’Reilly was making the case that if President Obama spoke out about Trayvon Martin, then he ought to make a comment on Christopher Lane as well. “I think the president, and Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton, and some others jumped at the chance to weigh in when a horror would further their political goals,” Obenshain said. “When it served the president’s agenda to sort of stir up racial animosity, he compares Trayvon Martin to what his son would look like.”

O’Reilly actually pushed back on her accusation, but Obenshain didn’t back down, “I think he absolutely wanted to stir suspicion on racial bounds.”

Later in the interview O’Reilly went on to say that Kirsten Powers, a Democratic strategist, sounded ridiculous for trying to speak to the magnitude of guns in this widespread problem. That’s right —  in a case where three teenagers under the age of 18 have access to a gun to kill another person, the outrage lies in President Obama stirring racial animosity, but not in the fact that gun control is still a serious issue.

H/T: Media Matters

The Black-On-White Violence Narrative

On multiple occasions in covering this case, Fox News anchors and commentators didn’t hesitate to blame this unfortunate instance of violence on racism, or black hatred for white people specifically.

Many conservatives, including Fox News’ Fox & Friends, falsely identified the perpetrators of this crime as three black teens, when one was actually white. The Daily Caller even ran this photo, incorrectly identifying another black teen as Michael Jones.

black teens jones

In the video clip above, frequent Fox commentator Pat Buchanan made the argument that “the most common form of interracial hate crime is black on white.”

The Five also jumped on the narrative. Conservative commentator Eric Bolling referred to a tweet that gunman James Edwards sent out in April that said, “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM” as somehow dictating the narrative of all black sentiment toward the white community.

Bolling said during Thursday’s show, “My issue is that the media’s not calling this what this is. These are two black kids, the shooter is black, he killed a white guy, he said he hates white people…this is a black-on-white violence and the media doesn’t like it, it doesn’t fit their debate.”

“They want to hear white-on-black crime,” he went on. “They don’t want to talk about black-on-black crime and they don’t want to talk about black-on-white crime. The only thing that fits the rundown on MSNBC seems to be white-on-black crime.”

You can watch the full clip here.

Photo: The Daily Caller via Mediaite

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